Summers Of Discontent

Abstract: Agreed, some people are low lives, and focusing on them distract from more worthies issues. Paraphrasing, Paul Krugman himself said that he regretted to have to worry about idiots so much, but somebody had to do it. All the more as those low lives have been leading civilization, into devastation, to the point they may terminate it.

Lawrence Summers had positions at the apex of the governance of the USA and the world, for more than 30 years; he is a plutocratic mastermind.

Obama: Summers To Save World Once Again.

No conspiracy in the USA, just a central committee (Goldman Sachs-Citigroup-Clinton’s minder, plutocrat Robert Rubin on the left, plutocrat Lawrence Summers on the right of the clown in the middle, the head of the US Central Bank).

Meanwhile crucial economic activity of governmental type, such as science, is cut all over (because of”sequestration”, another smart idea proposed to Congress by another of Obama’s very bank connected wealthy advisers: who needs neoconservatives when one has Obama advisers, the children of Summers?)

Don’t worry: Summers’ feisty creatures, such as Sherryl Sandberg, Facebook’s spymaster, and other friends, including the U2’s propagandist Bono, are making more billions than ever. Their wealth, certainly, is not sequestrated.

Larry Summers was, as Clinton Treasury Secretary, the point man allowing unregulated financial derivatives, thus making the real economy derivative ever since. Just on that point, from the progressive point of view, he should be disqualified to be in Obama’s cabinet. But Obama is not about progress, he is about the man he admires so much, he said, Ronald Reagan.

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FASCISM PROVED EXCELLENT TO (MOST OF) ITS COLLABORATORS:

The taking over of the world by the same group of people, families and friends is very old: Senator Baucus’ family has reigned over his state for five generations (Baucus selected some insurance industry VP write Obamacare).

Plutocracy’s blossoming is older than the BIS (Bank of International Settlements), The BIS was created by Washington in the early 1920s, to safeguard (under Reichsbank’s head H. Schacht’s supervision) the transfer of formidable assets of the Nazi Party, and associated plutocrats, throughout the world, before, during, and after World War Two.

(The BIS is the central banks of central banks; however, due to its blatant Nazi connections, its elimination was evoked for a few seconds after WWII… before it got stealthily reconducted)

In the end, Germany prosecuted only 13,000 Nazis. However, the Nazi Party reached, by 1945, 8 million members. Considering all those who died, and Nazis in other countries (like international SS, of which there were hundreds of thousands), this means that 99.9% of Nazis were NOT prosecuted.

Many Nazis became rich from spoiling and then killing other people, in particular, Jews.

Many of the most prominent Nazis or their enablers became shining stars of the world after the war (examples: Marshall Von Manstein, hyper industrialist heir Thyssen, the most powerful German corporation, SS Major Von Braun and his close friends the extermination camps managers, Schacht, the Dulles, Prescott Bush, Harrimans, etc.; nota bene: the Federal Republic Deutschland just launched a campaign to catch remaining Nazi executioners!)

The case of the global corporations (mostly USA based) was telling: although many were the crucial enablers of Hitler, they were not punished. The French Republic tried to arrest IBM directors, in 1945, but secret services of the USA ex-filtrated three of them out of the Republic’s reach. Hitler had given IBM a monopoly for organizing the Reich.

(This was enough of an answer to the question: ‘why is it that there is so much propaganda against France in the USA, and why is it that some French have a problem with USA plutocracy?’)

So many Nazis, and most of their topmost collaborators, thrived after WWII. This fact helped to install the following mood: if the Nazis, their greatest friends, collaborators and enablers could get away with what they did, why not us?

The madness blatant in the Ayn Rand (guru to Greenspan and other neofascists) boiled down to a rage against any regulation, in other words, against any law. But for the law of the jungle. This is not different from the main mode of operation of the Nazis.

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LET’S TAKE THE WORLD OVER, MORE THAN EVER:

Summers, Sandberg, World Bank 1991. The Worst Rule The World, Because They’re Worse.

Who elected this people to give them control of the world? Well, their owners. Sherryl Sandberg is Summers’ kind of woman: greed unlimited. Let’s bank on the world, spy on the world, and make taxpayers pay for it.

More than a decade later, Summers blocked Christina Romer’s pleas for more stimulus in Obama’s administration. Blocking the spirit of empathy, fairness, or just the rule of law, seems Summers’ call in life. He had a horrible fight to oppose Brooksley Born, chairperson of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), an agency supposed to combat fraud.

Greenspan, Rubin and Summers told Ms. Born that fraud in financial derivatives should not be something one inquires about. Neither of these three graces is a lawyer. Ms. Born was a very experienced lawyer, since her star days in Stanford, and as a partner in a prestigious law firm, she spent decades practicing high level finance.

In other words, Greenspan, Rubin and Summers were meta-criminals, people who believe some crimes are self-correcting. A meta-criminal believes that some crimes are not crimes.

In the “Committee To save The World”, made of Rubin, Greenspan and Summers, Summers was the “enforcer”. Enforcer of the Law of the Jungle.

Summers screamed to Born on the phone that she was going to cause another depression, and that he had “13 bankers in his office” telling him that. In the end Born’s opponents called an “emergency working group”, and a propaganda campaign was organized against her until Congress demolished the CFTC.

Summers’ sycophants are typically Wall Street operators such a Steven Rattner in the New York Times (02 Aug. 13) going delirious about Summers’ extraordinary intelligence: the most brilliant, most analytical and most surgical brain of anyone I’ve ever encountered.”

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WHERE IT IS SHOWN SUMMERS IS DUMB:

Summers hyper intelligent? Summers is simply no scientist, being only a vulgar economist (at best).

However Summers, not a scientist, insulted all women scientists by saying that women are not as capable as men. He said this as Harvard President, presiding over a vast assembly of professors who had come to listen to him, in his function as Harvard president.

Yet, several of the very greatest scientists of the 20th century were women. Example: the Curies (Marie and Irene), the towering mathematician Emmy Noether, the discoverer of jumping genes, Barbara MacClintock. Hence Mr. Summers is crass ignorant, arrogant, and not smart (to say the least). Besides being sexist to the point of imbecility.

All the female scientists I just mentioned are not just famous, but turned out to have been brazen geniuses: they introduced science so revolutionary, that it was viewed as completely wrong, sometimes for decades. That, in combination with their genders, made their careers very difficult.

What is a genius to Wall Street has, unsurprisingly, just the mind of a leech, for those endowed with common sense.

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SUMMERS: FOR CO2, & ALL IMAGINABLE CORRUPTION:

Summers is a condensed parody of plutocracy. He started as a twenty something PhD in Reagan’s cabinet. This stellar career springs from hereditary plutocracy: two of Summers’ uncles were Nobel Prizes in economics.

By 1991, Summers was chief economist at the World Bank, escorted by Sandberg. This is what he said, in his official quality as the world’s guiding economist:“There are no… limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future. There isn’t a risk of an apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit, is a profound error and one that, were it ever to prove influential, would have staggering social costs.”

More Summers as chief economist world bank: “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that…. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.” [This statement does not sound correct nowadays, even to the clueless, so Summers, smart as ever, now, claims it was meant to be a parody. Sure: Summers himself is a parody.]

But Summers’ position on CO2 was certainly serious. Lethally serious. He was the leading voice within the Clinton Administration arguing against the USA doing anything about greenhouse gases, and against US participation in the Kyoto Protocol (according to internal documents made public in 2009). This demolished Kyoto, as the European Union went at it alone, to staggering unilateral cost, causing the EU an important trade disadvantage.

Big Sister Sandberg: Already Your Boss In The 1990s

Why to mention Sandberg all the time? Because she is typical of the corruptocracy around Summers. She was sent by the government (what else?) to the top of Google, obviously part of a Faustian bargain. Industrial spying for the government by Google and company started about that time (before 9/11).

Some of Summers’ creatures are expensive, and not just to the Constitution of the USA. Bob Rubin, that wise leech, cost taxpayers 100 billion dollars… So far. Not counting interest. 100 billions, personally, just for his little hobby (Citigroup).

Hence the importance, for the powers that be, of putting Summers at the top of the central bank: Summers will make sure that his friends the top plutocrats are not left holding the bag. (Remember: he is the brightest croc alive, he will find something…)

Summers’ career is in orbit around the theme that greed is all the need we have. In 2000 Summers, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, teamed up with Greenspan and Enron CEO to claim California energy crisis was dues to “excessive regulation”. (They pushed the impudence to lecturing California’s republican governor Gray Davis!)

In truth Enron criminally organized shortages and made a fortune from Summers’ just authorized mood of doing whatever bets with derivatives. “(Conveniently Enro’s CEO Lay had a “heart attack” before sentencing; his conviction, just as conveniently, was then “vacated”.)

Summers pontificated that “…increased government involvement in the health care sector is a risky idea.” But apparently financial derivatives are not a risky idea. Is the rest of the world, with its nationalized health care risky? Yes! Obama wealthcare is safer for those who enjoy it!

On Pinochet loving, libertarian economist Milton Friedman’s death, Summers said that “…any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites.” if honest democrats believe this, one fears to imagine what dishonest ones such as Summers believe.

Summers pressured the Korean government to raise its interest rates and balance its budget in the midst of a recession, right in the middle of the South-East Asian crisis. During this crisis, Summers, along with Paul Wolfowitz, pushed for regime change in Indonesia (See the book The Chastening, by Paul Blustein).

By the way, this shows that neoconservatives are, truly, neofascists, and that the distinction between left and right is irrelevant (as it already was in the fascism of the 1930s: then, all the fascists, including Stalin, were allied with each other, either officially, or secretly, at one point or another!)

In truth fascists and plutocrats are after getting as much power on other men as they can, with whatever methods come in handy.

Hitler explained that the obsession with power, doing whatever to get more power, without ethics or mental coherence, was fascism’s main strength.

Hitler had to re-iterate this explanation after he made a spectacular alliance with the Polish colonels in January 1934, standing on its head the main axis of the Nazis’ implicit program (re-subjugating the nations Germany used to occupy, and had lost because of the Versailles Treaty).

Strength, of course is everything for those who affect to believe the Will to Power is (nearly) everything.

Summers set up a project through which the Harvard Institute for International Development advised the Russian government between 1992 and 1997. It emerged later that some of the Harvard advisers had invested in Russia, to profit from their own advice. Summers encouraged then-Russian leader Boris Yeltsin to use the same “three-‘ations'” of policy he advocated in the Clinton Administration– “privatization, stabilization, and liberalization.”

It got to the point that a USA Federal judge ruled that, by investing on their own accounts while advising the Russian government, Harvard professor Shleifer (and Moscow-based assistant Jonathan Hay) had conspired to defraud the US Agency for International Development (USAID), which had been paying their salary.

Harvard had to pay $26 million and Shleifer $2 million in fines. (Why is it that fat cats mostly pay fines and rarely go to the slammer?)

The Russian-born 45-year-old Shleifer is another superstar of the economics profession. Like Summers, he won the Clark Medal, the award of top economist under 40. Shleifer became the editor of Harvard’s Quarterly Journal of Economics at the age of 28, and became editor in 2006 of the American Economic Association’s Journal of Economic Perspectives. What we are facing is a galaxy of greed from second knives, below the old money and Wal Mart family class (worth around 100 billion dollars, same order as the Gates’ control of 120 billion dollars).

Instead, Learn to Love Plutocracy.

The perspective, ladies and gentlemen, is something akin to what happened 1,000 years ago, when the richest plutocrats instituted the feudal order in Europe. Plutocracy is what happens when the Dark Side breeds with the mathematics of the exponential. It’s not about brains, or being right, or wrong. It’s about who you know, power, and breed.

1,000 years ago elective processes were replaced first by money, and then, heredity. The best intellectuals, inside the Church, objected in vain that the Church used elections to select the best, and that secular society ought to go on that way. But it was not about being the best, and selecting the best. It was about power that be.

That’s why Obama loves Summers. Not because Summers is lovely (even Obama cannot be that clueless!). But because Obama is scared.

Want fun? Greenspan finally came in front of congress in 2009 and recognized that there was a “flaw” in his perception of “reality” and his “ideology”. He looked ready to puke, complete with quivering lips and bulging eyes. Tough for an addict of the mad Ayn Rand to admit that the law is of some use.

More fun? Sandberg, Summers’ pet, who used to live (in some pictures at least) inside Summers’ arm pit at Harvard, after being installed at the apex of Clinton, Google and Facebook, and making billions, now gives lessons to women of the world to preach to them the exact opposite of what she did.

A word of wisdom from an expert? “…the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”

[Adolf Hitler , Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X]

Want hope? The (mostly) Franco-American robot Curiosity, as large as a small truck, just had its first birthday. The scientific results are considerable; they demonstrate that there were streams on Mars, with chemical conditions suitable for life.

Curiously, Mars is anticipated to be so favorable to present Earth life, that the Mars missions are sterilized at huge cost (as much as half a billion dollars for a future life searching mission!). Some suggest to cease that policy. And I agree! One should view Mars as a colonization target, and we may as well send as much life there as possible, in the hope it will adapt (and then we can bioengineer the survivors to produce oxygen).

28 Responses to “Summers Of Discontent”

Dear GMax: it’s complicated. As I have explained many times in the past, fascism is an instinct. Whereas plutocracy is a modern, civilized (so to speak) phenomenon, where fascism is just one ingredient. Capital is another. I do not view fascism and capital as only evil, or necessary evils, but as assets that have to brought to bear appropriately. And only then.
PA

Dear Lovell: Thanks for the medal! :-)!
I decided to do another carpet bombing run on Summers after being apraised of Obama’s delirium about the gentleman.

I do not think that Obama cares about his legacy. I know someone who knew him from way way way back, and she has a very pessimistic assessment. Obama is smart enough to believe that if the Dark Side wins, it will sing his praises forever. And, as it is, most of the left still sings his praises (I used to be called Tea Party in 2009, by some of the slef described “democrats”, which felt surreal, after having given two full years, and most of my means, to get Obama elected!)

Darth Vader, in the end, at the very bottom, was a good guy. Not all people are that way, though. Some people, at the very bottom, are pure evil. It’s not a question of logic, it’s a question of neurohormones.
PA

Dear Lovell: Yes, but the republicans are not going to stop him: Obama has turned into a better Bush, behind which to hide, for them!

It was sort of weird, as I reproduced on “endless Summers”, that (some at) the Wall street Journal started to repeat word for word my arguments of more than 4 years ago… It’s not to be sneered at, that’s how mentalities advance.

Unbelievably, Obama chased down the Judicial system some Fox News reporter for him to reveal his source. does that mean Fox is now on the far left of Obama?
Ironical and devastating, (some of) that the Murdoch machine to be found, way left of Obama…

On all these things we can compare with the dreadful past, namely Nixon. Nixon as president, not McCarthyist… as president, Nixon’s idea of torturing leftist was to raise both arms, and make a double victory sign… Retrospectively funny, and even Watergate means that he did not have the command of the state to do whatever. Anyway, Pentagon papers Ellsberg said things were more terrible now. The worst being that they could get much worse… When I see democratic pundits going hysterical in their support of Obamacare (OK, let’s suppose it works to some extent: can’t you see the problems?)
PA

It’s always fun to read your blitzkrieg on plutocracy, but your support for the wasted money flying to Mars is surprising. Yes it’s interesting to know there was water on Mars, now what? We are Earth bound creatures, there is no home for us in the cold dust – if we can’t even co-exist in a warm, wet paradise, how do you expect us to thrive in the cold drought?
Isn’t the deeper aim of philosophy to find a meaningful, ecological way to live here as terrestrial intelligence?

Dear Andrej: I am not against investments, and against capital. The deeper aim of philosophy is wisdom. By 2017 or so, we will have about 8 billions to take care of. Without modern technology, more than seven billions would have to die in short order. Not wise, let alone ethical.

Some say we use about TWO earths, right now. I say we use MUCH more (basically 14, from what I just said…) We have exactly the same problem as the ones the imperial Romans got: quick exhaustion of available resources, no replacement.

I am not just talking vaguely there, as a Left Bank philosopher having had one too many in the Cafe’ de Flore… The ROI on shale whatever is not good: the major oil companies are not making much profits (if at all!) from FRACKING. Some will laugh. But I do not: the ROI of the past is now turning into red ink… Oblabla wasted time not developing solar power in the South West, and not starting a massive nuclear research program on advanced fission (as the NIF has turned unexpectedly a complete failure).

I don’t feel that the war against plutocracy is a Blitzkrieg, it’s more reminiscent of 1939-1945 (which, according to me was part and parcel of it, actually!) First, big setbacks…

Space programs, in aggregate, between the EU, the USA, Japan and India cost at most 50 billions a year (only a third of this being NASA). They pay for themselves. Imagine doing without weather satellites??? And also GPS, to start with. Europe, led by the French Republic, is launching its own GPS system, Galileo, more precise than GPS, and independent of the Washington plutocrats. A civilian aim is to be able to plow fields with GPS guided automatic tractors.

Plutocracy produces nothing, except unfairness. It cost trillions, every single year. And what we invest into, is the end of the Republic. Watch Obama’s prosecuting all those who reveal war crimes, and constitutional violations: if Johnson and Nixon had done the same, we would still be fighting in Vietnam!

Terra Forming of Mars is entirely feasible. Curiosity was enjoying temperatures above freezing as the sun was setiing recently (2 Celsius!). As I said some scientists were terrified that Earth microbes would thrive there. I would send them deliberately with the next lander.

Pictures of Enceladus show apparently water, plenty of it, on the surface. At least, so I see.

To go beyond is what wisdom does. We have an entire solar system to go beyond into. Visually the two giant telescopes whose construction was decided, the USA’s 30 meters on Hawai’i (with wwhich I am legally involved!) and the Extremely Large 40 meters European one in Chili should allow to resolve possible Earths within reach… Europeans have resolved an extra solar planet already.

We are no more Earth bound than Africa bound. earth and Mars are a common eco system, they, assuredly, exchanged life forms before. We are probably Martians in exile.

BTW, I do not have technological delirium. Just looks like it, but not really. Fact is, it’s hard to tell which technologies will really work. We just have to keep on trying, to find the more advanced techs we need, because, if we do not, we, or those we love, or would love, are toast.
PA

Clearly we need advanced, clean tech now, here on Earth – why does it always have to involve travel into the great nothingness? What took billions of years to balance (ecology, ie. Emerald planet) we will never make within time frame we need to survive. Terra forming is arrogance on planetary scale, we can’t even maintain equilibrium of systems already functioning great.
Obviously the spores of life came from afar, but that doesn’t make us Martians – like mycellium we are a network of terra. We would crack like eggshells out there, in every dimension.
But blitzkrieg, ie. shock & awe warfare of words against plutocrats is futile and bascially angst, especially when it involves so many ad hominem attacks. Blowing up yachts might be worth a tickle, and having it on live TV could be a hit, but it sounds like -yes, just the trap ‘they’ invented: terrorism. It seems clear from all your historical expositions on the blog that there has hardly been a time when the elite has sucked the blood of commoners. Anyhow, methinks it behooves philosophy to aim higher, since it is the love of wisdom – and not war of minds; deeper meaning of wisdom is love of life of Earth, since we only now this for now and I’m sure we would need other ways of thinking to survive the dull days of cold distance beyond our trees. Would you enjoy running around a circular track on a white spaceship instead of a forest?

“Why is it that fat cats mostly pay fines and rarely go to the slammer?”

A rhetorical question, with the obvious answer being “because they don’t like going to the slammer”. On the other hand, whatever fines they are subjected to are ultimately paid out of shareholders’ pockets. What an exquisitely pleasurable feeling it must be.

As usual history provides us with precedent. When the Imperial Chinese rulers tortured to death English ambassadors, the incensed Brits started thinking of suitable reprisals. Their French allies favored classical measures such as burning down Beijing or levying a punitive fine. The Brits wisely observed that the Manchu ruling class could not care less about Beijing’s populace, or about a fine it only would have to extract from the peasantry. What it did care about was its nice private little summer resort. Hence the decision to burn down the Summer Palace (looting it first was the ever practical French soldiers’ idea). Perfectly adequate as a punishment and efficient as an incentive to behave. (I’m not discussing the basically criminal nature of the Opium Wars).

Short of offering them a long stay in sunny Guantanamo, instead of tickling them silly with fines, blowing up (live on TV) the guilty plutocrats’ sprawling mansions, private islands, gas guzzling jets and ridiculous stretch limos would be a much more efficient decision of justice. Drones would be perfect for the job.

Dear Dominique: I thought I knew about the Franco-British war against Mandchu China, but did not know this particular point. That the burning of the summer Palace was punishment where it hurts.

Right now the punishments of the banks are dilrious, indeed, as they get paid by paul Krugman, I mean, Quantitative Easing. But I am on the record as saying properties ought to be recovered in kind. In other words, do not burn the Summer Palace, but rent it to the People.

This stays a practical solution, after a revolution. Instead what we have, in the case of AIG is plutocrats accusing the government to have forced AIG to accept 180 BILION dollars, under honerous terms! Judges, of course agree. They are paid (below the table, typically close family; see Clarence Thomas) to agree about those things…
PA

Dear Andrej: Specialists know Mars and Earth exchanged meteorites, even very recently. One of them, coming from Mars was studied in exquisite details, and it was shown its interior was never exposed to temperatures high enough to kill bacteria. People organize expeditions to pick up Martian meteorites laying on the ice in Antarctica.

Mars being more outsides, and smaller, and Earth having undergone some catastrophic melting much later, it is likely life got started on Mars. So it seems that, before we came from Africa, we originated on the red planet. Indignities keep on piling up…

I do not advocate using terrorism against plutocrats, just making them regurgitate what they stole, and make us pay again, to pay them with, for having stolen us in the first place.

Clean tech, so far, is mostly a dream. Its presence is not supported by statistics. Most clean energy, by far, is hydro. I am not advocating travel in the great nothingness as the only solution. Terraforming Mars could well be extremely rapid, if we unleashed Terran biology.

We have to unleash maximum tech, while we can, and that means doing max research (not the silly crony tech the Obama administration has been mostly doing so far…). We do not know which research will bring the big breakthroughs.

But that does not mean I support all and any tech. The most expensive program ever, has been the F35 (it’s kind-of-research). This catastrophically uselless plane has already swallowed about 30 years of NASA budgets, and it would not work at all in war. Same with the heavy launcher NASA ia asked to built, that too is catastrpohic. The Orion capsule Launch Abort System is 14,000 pounds, 2/3 of the weight of the (useless) capsule…

Some will say I confuse tech and science. No. I support the latter, always, but catastrophic tech can suck it up dry by grabbing all funding (as is happening at NASA internally). Mars projects do not have to be very expensive: forget sterilization, they get much cheaper.
The real problem is that NASA has run out of power sources (Curiosity is nuclear powered, but there are no more of these nuclear generators! The rock blasting French laser on board could certainly not work from solar power… ;-)!)
PA

No Roden, social media and independent journalism, what is left, will keep fighting. And even the most oppressed will get tweets and pings. Assange, Manning and Snowden have started movements. Non Violent Civil Disobedience is spreading. It can’t be suppressed with pepper spray and soft restraints. To many heroes in this show. They will win little by little. Patience, there are more good than bad, Even if the bad have all the money and congress. It may seem they rule the world but that’s what they want to believe. My thoughts, my mind, my actions are the world to me.

There is Roden, we have the internet… Truth can hardly be sequestered the way the have in history books. Researching the truth is a simple finger click away. watching science is a click away. People know more. Education is an easy choice today. I have faith in knowledge. Many old stays are dismantling. This is not my fathers’ world.

I’m a Brit. Been a legal US resident for just over 2 years. Before that did business with America for years and years. Thought I knew the country. But just like the world seems a strange place these days, the USA seems more ‘foreign’ day by day.

Well, I know individuals who were born in the USA and will certify that the country is getting more and more alien everyday. The USA is getting estranged with itself. before Obama no president was in the habit of going begging to the rich for all to see… Just an example. Another example? Public universities were founded in the 1950s and 1960s to provide FREE education. I have a nephew going to the (“public”) University of Washington because he is a computer genius. Tuition? More than half the median USA income. Each year, for the next three years or until he graduates. Does not matter that he lives with his family, who have been born in said state of Washington. Only reason he can afford it is that his dad has a (very) high income as a law firm partner (Bill Gates went to Harvard for the same reason, BTW).

Actually, reflecting on what I said over a breakfast bowl. While the Nation, USA that is, does seem foreign, the absolute opposite is the case in terms of our local community. The people who live around us are wonderful, beyond anything experienced elsewhere. And maybe, just maybe, therein is our salvation: A massive turning away from the faceless ‘rulers’ back to community and localism.

Yes, well, local communities are getting ever more impoverished, thus impotent in corrupt representative democracy. At some point, they break, and join the lumpen proletariat… so therein salvation, indeed, but it’s dying…
PA

There was a good quote in a New Yorker article about the recent overthrow of Morsi in Egypt, something to the effect of “The corrupt rule efficiently because they want to turn a profit, the failed rule miserably because they won’t admit they have failed.”

Andy: Morsi was advancing the Muslim Brotherhood and nominated at least one total bloddy terrorist as governor (he had directed a raid that killed dozens of tourists years ago). It was a case of getting rid of Hitler before his grip got too strong. This said, there are indeed diverse types of corruption. The one led by Summers and his ilk is of the feudal, long term type, where it gets incrusted deep and becomes the society itself (see my two recent essays on Summers).

Seems to me the New Yorker’s argument is not far from justifying corruption. The 2008 crisis (still going on, be it only because banks were given more than 8 trillions, in the USA alone… by the Fed’s balance going wacko!) was a case of the corrupt stealing themselves, and asking We the People to reimburse them. But Obama has not noticed?
PA